When you talk to people who remember John Fitzgerald Kennedy's assassination, they overwhelmingly share the same collective reminiscence: They watched events unfold throughout four days of uninterrupted network TV news coverage.

"We were glued to the TV trying to be assured by Walter Cronkite that we would be OK. The next few days were spent around the TV, following the assassination's aftermath," said Roger Brace of Brookfield, Wis., who was a high school sophomore at Rockford Auburn High School on Nov. 22, 1963, the day JFK was killed.

For many like Brace, it was the first major event that was "as seen on TV" instead of read about in newspapers or heard on the radio.

"They announced over the (Marengo High School) PA system that the president had been shot and was dead. They sent us home and for three days I was glued to the TV, watching everything," said Angie Scott of Winnebago.

But did the JFK assassination mark the arrival of television as the dominant news source? For some it did, but television had already traveled far down that road by the time JFK was killed.

"TV had been a novelty until the beginning of the 1960s," said William McKeen, chair of the Department of Journalism at Boston University. He listed the 1960 presidential campaign between Kennedy and Richard Nixon as a key event in television's development of news, "and back then, TV was more interested in politics."

That campaign featured four televised debates. The first one, televised from Chicago's CBS studio, attracted 70 million viewers.

The drama of the space program could only be captured properly by TV, "and Walter Cronkite was there to explain it, even the hurry-up-and-wait delays associated with early launches," McKeen said.

"Teachers wheeled TV sets into classrooms to let the class see (space) launches," he said.

People also watched presidential news conferences, which were carried live, as well as coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Today's TV watchers, who have a dizzying array of hundreds of TV channels and millions of video choices on several digital platforms, may think of it as odd that in the early 1960s, there were just three national networks, so "we only had three choices, and we all shared common experiences," McKeen said.

"All three networks canceled all advertising and offered continuing coverage of the events surrounding the assassination," McKeen said.

Indeed, tens of millions of Americans watched as assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was shot dead in a hallway of the Dallas Police Department by Jack Ruby, a small-time nightclub owner.

"We saw a live murder. We saw a grief-stricken (JFK funeral) ceremony. It was a defining moment," McKeen said.

TV, McKeen remembers his father telling him, "was for news and sports."

Page 2 of 2 - As it turned out, the JFK assassination coverage was a harbinger of awful events also to be pictured by TV cameras "as we watched everything unfurl on TV — other assassinations, war. People who grew up then have a common reference point," McKeen said.